The Old Guard and Languages
Disclaimer: I am deliberately working with only what we see in the films, so the featurette has no bearing; and also, my languages are English/German/Russian/BR-Portuguese, so, rather a lot of European bias there.
Andy: Does not know all the languages, but looks like she does because she knows a) so many of them and b) so many root languages. You know how once you know a Romance language the second one is easier and the third is just weird slang (I say, as if I had experience with this)? She’s not working with a Romance language, she’s working with Proto-Indo-European. Also, just generally having enough grammar background and learning-languages experience that she can cobble together something that sounds almost right (”Are you from Poland? You speak Quechua like you’re Polish”) in very little time. Mainly struggles with figuring out which language someone is speaking in the first place. Extremely utilitarian about her language enthusiasm, she Keeps Up To Date.
Quynh: Not really very far behind Andy. The main thing she struggles with, at this point, is the degree to which languages have changed since she was put in the box. Her English is stilted - it’s Modern English - and she laughs in weird places (like every time someone asks what she’s doing she says “Nothing!” and pokes Andy in the ribs). She’s like that in everything. Adores pictographic alphabets, they keep her entertained for longer, and is going to have a field day working out scientific terms in written, modern Chinese. No dictionaries, that’s cheating.
Yusuf: Not at the wizard level of the first two, but a bit above the sort of person who’s just like, “Oh, I’ve never heard that language... but I know Serbian and Arabic, so... he’s talking about the garbage truck schedule, and he’s wrong, let me just let him know.” (I’m told these people exist. See point abut Andy.) He enjoys language the most of them, in terms of what it can do poetically, and geeks out about metaphors, idioms, and translations in a way only Booker is prepared to follow him on.
Nicoló: Please not another language. Oh, please, no. He picks up lingua francas as they come, but language is just not his thing. On the other hand, the pidgin he has with Yusuf is ornately weird. Like when I was in Germany and studying quantum mechanics with another expat and we’d just remember the word in one language half way through a sentence and change languages to follow it up, but then with German verb kickers every so often the sentence would end *pause* ...können. Add to that the fact that Nicoló loves slang the most. They have an agreement, as a group, that slang doesn’t count until it’s survived for fifty years; Nicoló uses, and abuses, slang way before then, and he’ll translate it half way through too. His language is a mess.
Booker: Closest to Nicoló in terms of learning the currently-relevant languages and going from there. So he’s got French/English/Spanish/Portuguese, plus Occitan and Ligurian for personal reasons, and then he added Romansh and Romanian because he’d collected one from every other category of Romance languages and I guess - and then Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese... but if you asked he’d tell you Spanish, Arabic, French, English. SAFE. He wants them purely for reading purposes, but he’s also the go-to guy for sign languages.
Nile: English, high school French and Spanish, the beginnings of Pashto. She’s not bad with languages, she’ll probably wind up around Yusuf’s level. She’s motivated by communicating with people (I cannot relate), but given the American school system her French and Spanish are both pretty rudimentary and also decaying. Booker’s bringing her up to speed, which means her French is going to also be a bit weird, because he’s very Académie française about his French and passionately disagrees with the académie on several fronts. (Yusuf has an almost inverse relationship with Arabic, I can’t remember the terms I’d need to explain that idea.) Nile is the one who delights the most in linguistic puns, and bilingual or worse puns. She does not consider herself capable in a language until she has punned in it.
Nicoló is trying to decide whether to bake Nile Happy New Language cakes, or if he really does not want to encourage this behavior. He’s not sure he has a leg to stand on given the slang thing, but what she’s doing is abominable. Booker approves, because he’s French, and is considering suggesting Japanese as her next language, which has Quynh’s support because she doesn’t know he’s only in it for the puns.
